You don't. You force Congress to obey the Constitution, and if that means the scope of the law has to be drastically scaled back so that Congress can manage it the way the Constitution says it's supposed to, good. We have far too many nanny state laws anyway that do much more harm than good.
Is it? What if your profitability depends on using a polluting substance, like PFAS, and not cleaning up after yourself?
> Companies who actually have to survive in a free market won't do it for that reason.
Bullshit. We have _many_ examples of the opposite. Remember the whole leaded gasoline hearing, for one. Or the resistance to lead and asbestos phaseout.
Moreover, the "free market" _forces_ companies to do that. After all, suppose that you're a responsible company, and you spend money on installing expensive scrubbers for your wastewater to remove PFAS. Your less-responsible competitors will then outcompete you because their product is cheaper-priced.
That's why you need laws that force _everyone_ to become equally less competitive by not poisoning people.
Your environmental example is equally bad even when people have easy direct damages they can show like the Exxon Valdeeze spill the cost of litigation is massively skewed in favor of the company who can afford to drag cases out for a decade or more until the plaintiffs simply run out of money and have to take a smaller settlement. It's even worse with a lot of pollutants where the effect is more minor but drastically worsens a person's life but happens to so many people it's in aggregate a huge cost. Usually those take the form of an increased risk or prevalence of disease and the company gets to argue endlessly about their culpability for poisoning people because it's hard to prove the negative that they wouldn't have gotten cancer/breathing problems/etc in the absence of the pollution...
[0] to allow long term profitable companies to weather short term undercutting by larger companies who can take the losses to kill a competitor for example)
This doesn't work in a free market. Look up David Friedman's discussion in, IIRC, Price Theory of competitors to Standard Oil.
> the Exxon Valdeeze spill
This was a product of ineffective government regulation, not a free market. In a free market Exxon would have been bankrupt after one such spill--and knowing that would be the outcome, they would have taken better steps to prevent it. Similar remarks apply to, for example, the Deepwater Horizon spill.
> the cost of litigation is massively skewed
And why? Because governments made it that way.
The cheapest way to make things is to hide the waste until it becomes someone else's problem. Look at some of the mining Superfund sites. Are you voting with your dollars by not buying mined products? The company that made the mess you didn't even know about and are now paying for was dissolved years ago.
Or the owner of a gas station lets their tanks rust out causing well water to be ruined in a mile radius. He abandoned the station and moved to another city in shame. And opened another gas station.
It sounds kinda like you're underestimating the lure of the bottom line in the free market.
Ronald Coase would beg to differ.
The free market has never existed on a wide scale, so no company currently has to survive in a free market. It is a thought experiment and in practice regulated markets are far superior because the market is a pretty bad governor for society. Further, to have a free market you need perfect transparency, a state which is not realistically possible to begin with but if it were possible would only be achieved through regulation, such as disclosure requirements.
In that free market, by the way, companies absolutely will poison the air and water, in large part because people do not make purchase decisions based on downstream externalities. Even if they did, they won't be able to prove the company poisoned the river and the company won't be breaking any laws so a lot of people will simply allow it to continue. Now if the products themselves were poisonous, it's possible, but historically this just led to merchants moving from town to town to poison new people who hadn't heard of them.
>The reason companies do nefarious things is government interference in markets, insulating companies from competition.
This is so ridiculous I am not sure you're serious now. Are you just trolling?
But...
> This is so ridiculous
It is? Aren't you saying the same thing?
Despite the "state of nature" being theoretical, you wouldn't say that the reason people harm eachother is because of government regulations, would you? Of course you wouldn't, because you can think of a lot of reasons for people to harm eachother absent government regulation.
See? You can say that the complete absence of social structure is a theoretical state and also say that the presence of government and social structure is not the sole cause for conflict.
First, I didn't say "conflict"; my statement was much more specific. Second, companies are not people. Companies are tools that people use. Some people misuse them.
Perhaps it will help if I rephrase: the reason nefarious people can use companies as tools to do nefarious things on a large scale, the kind of scale that affects a large number of people, is government regulation.
>the reason nefarious people can use companies as tools to do nefarious things on a large scale, the kind of scale that affects a large number of people, is government regulation.
You are wrong. Companies do nefarious things on a large scale and would even at peak efficiency in a free market because it is more efficient to cause harm than it is to take steps to prevent it.
Looking back to less regulated times in the US may be illustrative.
When there was no government regulation for river cleanliness, companies routinely polluted the rivers. They did not do this because of the government regulation that, again, did not exist. They did it because it is a lot cheaper to dirty a river than it is to install the mechanisms to keep it clean, and the benefits to the company from keeping the river clean, barring regulatory oversight, do not suffice to balance the scales.
Similarly, in countries with less stringent regulations companies pollute and cause widespread harm.
The acceptable level of pollution in a free-market system is much higher than the desirable level, because until a tipping point where the company's sales are impacted they will continue to pollute. The equilibrium point is lowered through regulation. That's literally what it does.
Since when?
Since as long as people haven't wanted polluted air and water or products with harmful substances in them. "Bad for business" means business in an actual free market, where customers have the final say. In what we have now, government has the final say, and government sucks at actually protecting us from these things. Or haven't you noticed that our air, water, and products still have all sorts of harmful things in them, despite all the government regulation?
Do you twiddle your mustache and snicker maniacally as you think up these specious arguments? Or are you parroting them from those who do?